Celtics legend Tommy Heinsohn knows his way around the canvas

Monday

Aug 31, 2009 at 12:01 AMAug 31, 2009 at 11:46 AM

As a basketball player, Tommy Heinsohn never met a shot he didn't like to launch. As a coach, he never met a referee's call he didn't like to challenge. As an announcer, he never met a hustling player he didn't like to praise. And as an artist, he never met a landscape he didn't like to paint.

Bob Tremblay

As a basketball player, Tommy Heinsohn never met a shot he didn't like to launch. As a coach, he never met a referee's call he didn't like to challenge. As an announcer, he never met a hustling player he didn't like to praise. And as an artist, he never met a landscape he didn't like to paint.

Yes, Heinsohn, a scoring machine for the Boston Celtics during their eight championship seasons in the 1950s and '60s and the feisty coach of their two championship teams in the 1970s, is as comfortable around the canvas as he is the parquet floor. In fact, he's been an artist longer than he's been a hoop star.

"I've been interested in painting since I was a kid," says Heinsohn in the den of his Needham home where his paintings grace the walls. "I drew Christmas scenes with colored chalk on the blackboard in the third grade."

Painting actually provided a safe haven for Heinsohn while he was growing up in Jersey City, N.J. "I was the only German in an Italian-Irish neighborhood during World War II," he recalls. "I used to fight my way home from school. My mom worked so I was by myself and I started drawing just to amuse myself. It became my best friend. And it kept me out of trouble."

Like most artists, Heinsohn wanted to paint with oils. "I pestered my mom to get me some when I was in grammar school," he says. "She finally did when I was in the eighth grade. But the tubes were very tiny. Half of the painting ate up the tubes. I didn't have any canvas so I painted on the back of a box."

Heinsohn continued his artistic pursuits at St. Michael's High School in Union City, N.J., drawing for the school's yearbook. Encouragement came from a nun who asked Heinsohn to sketch amoebas and the like as she worked for her master's degree in biology, and a priest at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester who was impressed by Heinsohn's portrait of attorney Joseph Welch of Army-McCarthy hearings fame.

"The priest convinced me to put the portrait in the college show and I took a third prize in graphics," says Heinsohn. "He was also starting an art class and wanted me to attend it, but it interfered with basketball so I'd couldn't go regularly."

After graduating from Holy Cross, the 6-foot-7-inch Heinsohn joined the Celtics, winning a championship in his rookie season in 1956 and also garnering Rookie of the Year honors. He was a six-time NBA All-Star. After retiring in 1965, Heinsohn began his broadcasting career. He also began his formal training as an artist, taking lessons for two years from a teacher who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Heinsohn interrupted the lessons when he began coaching the Celtics in 1969. In addition to guiding the team to championships in 1974 and 1976, Heinsohn was named Coach of the Year in 1973. After leaving the coaching ranks at the start of the 1977-78 season, he returned to the broadcasting booth. In 1986 he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

A former resident of Newton and Natick, Heinsohn is now the color commentator for Celtics games on Comcast SportsNet New England. Three Emmy statues he's won during his broadcasting career sit on his television set.

While Heinsohn was traveling as a player, coach and broadcaster, he continued to paint. "When I travel I do mostly watercolors," he says. "Less paraphernalia to carry." The travel also accounted for his penchant for landscapes. "I got into doing watercolors looking out of hotel windows," he adds.

Through the years, Heinsohn has formed friendships with other artists and, as a group, they make painting excursions. "Instead of golf trips, we go on painting trips," he says. "We go to Maine, Vermont, Martha's Vineyard." In the Bay State, Cape Ann is a particularly popular spot.

"I've studied with very good teachers of landscape painting on Cape Ann," he says. "Every teacher I've had has helped me, but ultimately you become your own teacher."

The Heinsohn home is populated with African art sculptures which he and his wife Helen picked out over the years. An interior designer, she passed away last year after a long battle with cancer. A portrait of her hangs on a wall near the front door. Dating from 1977, it was Heinsohn's first acrylic painting.

Another work, an oil-and-acrylic painting called "Rochester Clothes," depicts the back wall of a big man's clothing store in San Francisco where Heinsohn took his players to buy clothes. The work with its elaborate brick detail took five years to finish. Hanging in his den, the painting has received numerous purchase requests, but it's not for sale.

Through the years, Heinsohn has had works in juried art shows and traveling exhibits. In a show called "Twice Gifted," featuring artists who gained fame in other pursuits, one of Heinsohn's works was placed opposite a painting by Winston Churchill a Heinsohn hero.

The most money the Celtics great has received for a painting is $2,500. He gives many works to friends and auctions off others for charity.

Heinsohn's basement studio provides a home for boxes of unframed canvases and shelves filled with how-to and art history books. Art magazines can be found throughout the house. Celtics photos and articles manage to find places to stay. On Heinsohn's studio easel now is an almost-finished landscape of Pumpkin Island Light in Maine. He signs his paintings "Heinsohn." "The last name is long enough," he quips. And if you want to see his artwork now? "You have to come to my house."

Dressed casually in a Mad Dog T-shirt and shorts, Heinsohn does see parallels between painting and basketball. "You spend years mastering the fundamentals and gradually you get to incorporate your imagination, your willpower and desire," he says.

Asked if his players ever gave him a hard time about his artistic side, Heinsohn has a quick reply. "What the hell do they know? And if they ever got fresh, I'd punch their lights out."

Dave Roberts, the former chief executive officer of United Liquors who now owns Truro Vineyards of Cape Cod, considers Heinsohn his artistic mentor.

"In my very early stages of painting, he took me under his wing," says Roberts who has known Heinsohn for 20 years. "He's such a great coach. He doesn't overwhelm you with anything. I always remember one day I was painting a boat. It kind of looked like it was floating above the water, and he said, 'Do you mind if I help you?' And I said, 'No.' He made one brush stroke and suddenly it was sitting down in the water just like it should. That's the way he is.

"His style of coaching allows you to do what you know and then he reinforces it. He's extremely bright. I'm always amazed at his depth of knowledge in a lot of areas."

Roberts, who resides in Wellesley and Truro, describers Heinsohn's artwork as "terrific. He has a wonderful push-pull way of getting the warms against the cools, the lights against the darks. He doesn't draw, he paints. He's not trying to do a photograph.

"We still occasionally go to classes together. I need them, he doesn't, but he still goes because he likes it. He could be giving the class but he likes picking up a couple pointers."